Thursday, January 05, 2017

Sears goes bankrupt - again. This time sells the tool brand Craftsman to Stanley/Black and Decker for $0.9 billion

Stanley, which makes and sells tools under the DeWalt and Black & Decker names, wants to grow the Craftsman brand by selling its products in more stores outside of Sears. Today, only 10 percent of Craftsman products are sold in other stores. Sears said it will continue to sell Craftsman, including at its Kmart and Sears Hometown stores. The Hoffman Estates, Illinois-based company first took control of Craftsman in 1927 when it bought the trademark for $500

Last May, Sears announced it was putting Craftsman, along with other iconic brands like Kenmore and DieHard, as well as its Sears Home Services repair business, up for sale, in an effort to sell off other attractive assets to maintain financial liquidity. In recent years, Sears has sold off the Lands' End (LE, +1.27%) clothing brand, its stake in Sears Canada, and it also spun off some of its best locations into a real estate investment trust, helping to raise billions of dollars.

Sears Holdings has lost some $10 billion since 2010 and the company, created by a Sears-Kmart merger engineered by Lampert in 2005, has yet to report a year of comparable sales growth, despite hundreds of store closings. In its most recent quarter alone, it lost $748 million, its worst performance in years as comparable sales, which exclude the impact of stores closed in the preceding year.

1 comment:

Craftsman was my favorite way back when...I recall I had a rachet..that bit the dust..I took it to one store and the girl handed me a repair kit..WTQ??..I took it to another store and they just handed me a new one.That's the way it should be and I still have it..Doesn't get used much anymore tho...